The Oscars delivered what it needed: a solid tribute to movies. It also had enough tongue-in-cheek humor and the musical numbers cut to just the right length that it never grew that tiresome. That said, it still ran over three and-a-half hours and, if you believe those figures, 36.6 million people ages 18-49 viewed the ceremony, down 18% from last year. That I believe. About an hour in, it really started to drag, though Tim McGraw did a solid rendition of Glen Campbell's "I'm not gonna miss you."
For the first time since I can remember, my pick for the year's best film won Best Picture. The Grand Budapest, in my top five, took four Oscars, and the winners eagerly all thanked Wes Anderson to the skies. The big surprise came when Eddie Redmayne won Actor over Michael Keaton. This one is tough, if only because cynics rear their heads, including part of mine, when someone plays a disabled. Long ago someone said playing comedy is so much harder than playing drama, and without Keaton, where would Birdman have landed? It's clearly his movie, his range, his tour de force that will be remembered. The film also, however, duly picked up Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, Cinematography, and Director. This has happened before: the director win and his better film loses Picture--remember two years ago when Ang Lee won for Life of Pi, his second time, for an extraordinary feat, yet Argo took home Best Picture. But then, it was twenty-five years ago as an exchange student in Europe that I learned the average Academy voting age; you don't quite look at the Oscars the same after finding that out. There's also only six thousand or so voting, so who's to say? And don't people like making up their own minds now than, say, Gene Shalit reviewed? That's what someone told me once, and I find it too true. So yeah, the Oscars will shake it up again and probably go back to an ol' reliable host, and then the ratings will go back up, and are the rest of us affected? Boy does that depend. Probably not, but hey, it's sorta like sports: no matter how corrupt, it's fun to get sucked back in.
For the first time since I can remember, my pick for the year's best film won Best Picture. The Grand Budapest, in my top five, took four Oscars, and the winners eagerly all thanked Wes Anderson to the skies. The big surprise came when Eddie Redmayne won Actor over Michael Keaton. This one is tough, if only because cynics rear their heads, including part of mine, when someone plays a disabled. Long ago someone said playing comedy is so much harder than playing drama, and without Keaton, where would Birdman have landed? It's clearly his movie, his range, his tour de force that will be remembered. The film also, however, duly picked up Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, Cinematography, and Director. This has happened before: the director win and his better film loses Picture--remember two years ago when Ang Lee won for Life of Pi, his second time, for an extraordinary feat, yet Argo took home Best Picture. But then, it was twenty-five years ago as an exchange student in Europe that I learned the average Academy voting age; you don't quite look at the Oscars the same after finding that out. There's also only six thousand or so voting, so who's to say? And don't people like making up their own minds now than, say, Gene Shalit reviewed? That's what someone told me once, and I find it too true. So yeah, the Oscars will shake it up again and probably go back to an ol' reliable host, and then the ratings will go back up, and are the rest of us affected? Boy does that depend. Probably not, but hey, it's sorta like sports: no matter how corrupt, it's fun to get sucked back in.
